Thursday, February 23, 2006

Upper or lower case in Wiktionary

Yesterday Brion made an executive decision. He decided that ALL wiktionaries will have lower case articles from now on. He changed the database so that lower case articles are allowed and ran a program that changed all entries from uppercase to lowercase.

The result was predictable, some wiktionaries like the Norwegian is really happy. They were anticipating this change of their database. They were ready for it and the major problems were done in a few hours. Not so with some of the other wiktionaries, there this was completely unanticipated and a lot of feathers were ruffled. When you do not have a plan, when it is against what you wish it does not make for an effective change.

The other thing that was not really pleasant, is that the bot used to create the interwiki links is broken. It is broken yet again. It does work after a fashion but it does not do all the work that it is supposed to do.

This month is probably set another record for the RobotGMwikt bot. As so many wiktionary entries have changed, it has to be changed on ALL projects. This month may be good for some 500.000 edits.. It is indeed great that we have interwiki links but the technology is not efficient.